The creators of Cappuccino recently announced that it has gone 100% JavaScript. The motivation for this was that the build chain contained dependencies on Ruby, which worked well but was problematic for contributors who aren’t familiar with the language.

Jake is what made this possible. Based on Rake, Jake is a build tool. If you’re not familiar with Rake or make, they’re used to invoke scripts that piece together large software projects.

Rake is so flexible that people often use it for tasks that would be traditionally performed with a shell script — the benefit is code reuse from other parts of the project. I use Rake for running tests, scripting deployment, getting stats from servers, and all kinds of housekeeping routines.